Expanding the capacity of my EX2 ultra

My Cloud OS 5 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX Series
1

I’m looking into expanding the capacity of my EX2 Ultra unit. I can’t find the answer to my question anywhere. I don’t use mirroring so that I have 2 x 2TB drives currently giving a capacity of around 3.92TB.

If I was to just change one drive to a 6TB so i’d have 2TB and 6TB drive would that expand my capacity to 8TB, will this work?

The way I understand it the RAID mode is where you mirror the drives (what I don’t want to do), so how would I go about changing without RAID mode if the above is true.

Sorry if this is a stupid question but want to be certain before making any purchases.

2

How are you setup exactly?

Are you setup as Raid 0? (data stripped across drives) or are you setup as JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) (where the drives show up as independent shares)?

If JBOD; then yes. . . just swap it out.
If Raid 0. . . then you are basically hosed. Pull one drive – - > The other drive becomes useless. (basically; you need to copy the data off completely before starting) (and for Raid 0; pretty sure the drives need to be the same size)

3

I’ve got 2 drives in the case and they show up as one volume when I use it on my computer. As far as I can tell that counts as JBOD? They aren’t backing each other up as I keep other backups.

Sorry my technological knowledge is pretty low.

4

I think I get it now. I have 2x 2tb drives that appear as one volume so this would be raid 0 which means the data is striped (split) between the two drives.

So to achieve the 8tb I’d like I need to get 2x 4tb drives and set them up as raid 0 also which would give me an 8tb volume?

Are NAS drive specs fairly universal? I’m in the U.K. and can only get them from the US. As it’s a US company I presume this doesn’t matter.

Thank you

5

Specs are NOT universal between companies.

But the are similar for drives rated for NAS service

two words of caution:

  1. Don’t mess with SMR drives. (Google SMR vs CMR) (in WD line: Stay away from Red; buy “Red Plus” or “Red Pro”)

  2. I would stay away from Raid Zero for reliability reasons. Lose one drive - - -ALL the data is lost. If you don’t need Raid 1 redundancy; I would use JBOD mode. You wind up up with two logical drives; but if you lose a drive; you only lose 1/2 the data.

1 Like